Putting Your Body on the Line: A Meditation on ?Hostile Environment? Sexual Harassment in Working-Class Perspective

Abstract

Listening to Anita Hill's testimony about pubic hairs on Coke cans and Long Dong Silver, I was immediately sure that she was telling the truth. When friends said, But it's all so goofy. Who would really say things like that? I replied that the goofiness of the stories was exactly what made me sure of their credibility. I had experienced such hostile environment sexual harassment, and that's how it was: unsettling but oblique, causing one to pause, confused and disbelieving, thereby insulating the perpetrator from direct counterattack. That he was only joking or making an innocent observation or engaging in collegial horseplay, are all defenses that the harasser calculatedly wants to keep available to himself should his target make a fuss. My own experience of such harassment occurred in 1978 and 1979, when I worked for the United States Postal Service as a letter-sorting machine operator. On this job, we spent perhaps forty-five minutes of every working hour keying (machine-sorting letters) and perhaps fifteen minutes (removing the sorted letters from the machine's bins and placing them in trays for delivery to local post offices). Keying was done at the front of the machine, where one was part of a long line of workers, with many people around; sweeping was done at the back of the huge machine, where one was out of sight, in relative isolation. Frequently, when women went to the back to sweep, we would find hand drawings of penises-some erect, some not-or other such offerings waiting for us on the ledges of the machine, left there by the male coworkers who had been sweeping just before us. The drawings weren't signed, nor were they addressed to anyone in particular; they were just there, unsettling, confusing, and conveying a hostility that was impossible to ignore. Still, how and whether to respond to them was not, to any of us, obvious. We didn't want to come across as prudes or as unsophisticated-certainly we'd seen things like this before-and, more important, we didn't want our male coworkers thinking we were crybabies who were thrown by little things (no pun intended). So we never mentioned the drawings-none of us. We just threw them under the machine or in the trash and went on about our business. No one ever told a supervisor (which would have been disloyal tattling on a fellow worker), no one ever told the union (actually, a shop steward was among our leading suspects), no one even much talked about it.